Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Why Don’t We Smile At Art Museums?
Made me smile.
Suellen and I love to go to art museums. I like to look at the art. I also like to observe people looking at the art. Here’s a basic truth: nobody smiles while looking at art in art museums. Ever. It’s just not done.
Why would that be? Is art really so serious that we can’t smile at it or about it? Is it acceptable for an artist to give us a nudge and a wink and let us in on a good joke? Some very serious literature can also make us laugh out loud. Couldn’t visual art do the same?
I’ve been worried about this for some time now. Here are my best guesses as to why we behave the way we do.
Art is hierarchical – artists profess to know something – or see something – that’s worth knowing. Further, artists profess to know something that the rest of us don’t. They present their ideas to us in museums. Since they know more than we do – in at least one domain – we look up to them. We show our respect with a serious demeanor.
Art museums are the new cathedrals – in centuries past, architects designed cathedrals to project power, wealth, and ineffable spiritual connections. Today, art museums serve the same function. Great architects used to design cathedrals; today they design art museums. You wouldn’t smile in a cathedral, would you?
Social imitation – we see that other people in art museums look very serious, so we assume that we should be serious, too. They see us being serious, so they assume they should be serious, too. With this in mind, I smiled continuously for 15 minutes in a very crowded Whitney museum. I got a few nervous glances but didn’t really have much impact. Perhaps we should organize smiling flash mobs to visit art museums. That might cheer things up a bit.
Museum mind – I enter a museum with a great deal of curiosity. I want to see things and learn things. Then, within a few minutes of entering, I see something that knocks my socks off. It captures my imagination and hangs on. My mind is preoccupied with the amazing thing I just saw. My eyes are seeing but my mind is not. With no new stimulus, my face goes blank. It’s not that I’m serious. I’m stunned.
We don’t get it – maybe we just don’t understand what we’re looking at. We keep looking for meaning when meaning is beside the point. We’re confused. And confused people don’t smile.
I enjoy going to art museums. I enjoy the art and the people watching. But I wish we wouldn’t be quite so serious about it all. It feels like going to church. I’d rather have it feel like fun. What about you?
Creating A Design Culture
Let us design your business.
I hate to admit it, but I may have spent my years in the software business looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I worked for sophisticated technology companies. Quite often, the fundamental question that animated us was, “What more can we do with all this great technology?”
As today’s technology companies (even IBM) are discovering, good design starts at the opposite end of the telescope: with user needs. Indeed, we may even need to discover user needs that users aren’t aware of. The trend is generally lumped under the terms, design thinking or design-oriented culture.
So how does one create a design-oriented culture? Here are some thoughts I’ve culled from recent readings.
It’s about the experience – the central question is simple: what do customers really need? Too often however, we add a limiting clause to the question: what do customers really need from us? Rather than focusing on the complete user experience, we ask a more self-centered question: How can we get customers to want more of what we have to offer?
Design thinking broadens the frame. Rather than thinking only about what we have to offer, we might think about how users acquire the product, how they learn to use it, and what ancillary products they might need to make the product useful.
McKinsey offers up two examples: 1) HP doesn’t just wait for you to order new ink cartridges. They monitor your use and send you cartridges before you even know you need them. 2) John Deere doesn’t just sell tractors anymore. They also offer,”… digital services such as crop advisories, weather alerts, planting prescriptions, and seeding-population advice.”
It’s about making sense – Jon Kolko in Harvard Business Review, argues that technologies and systems (think of our healthcare system) are so complicated today that people just can’t make sense of them. Good designs should address this. I find, for instance, that Turbo Tax addresses a complex issue and, in Kolko’s terminology, makes it “simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.” In other words, it’s well designed. Imagine if we could make buying health insurance equally simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.
It’s about prototypes – I remember introducing new products with a “big reveal”. We developed the products in secret. We couldn’t talk to customers about them – that would be selling futures. We built some buzz and, when everything was ready, we popped the new product out of the box. Sometimes the big reveal worked great. Sometimes not.
Kolko argues that design-cultures are much more interested in prototyping their ideas all along the development path. Kolko writes that, “The habit of publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an open-minded culture, one that values exploration and experimentation over rule following.”
It’s about emotions – software seems like the ultimately rational product. Buying software should be rational as well – the product with the most features should always win.
Alas, it’s just not true. Indeed, the software industry has much more in common with the fashion industry than one might imagine. It’s not just what the software does. It’s how it makes you feel as it’s doing it. If it does the job but makes you feel stupid, it’s not well designed.
(As an aside, I think this is why the Lars Lawson cartoon character worked well for Lawson Software. Lars touched on our emotions – something quite unusual for B2B software).
It’s about thinking – as Lawton Ursrey notes in Forbes: “Design thinking combines creative and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained.”
At the simplest level, design thinking means doing an about-face. Rather than facing inward, we turn around and face outward. We send our employees outside and bring our customers inside. It’s about attitude more than anything else. Unfortunately, attitudes are very hard to redesign.
Ethics And The Self-Driving Car
Why does it have to look like a car?
In last night’s critical thinking class, we discussed and debated how to instill ethics into self-driving cars. To kick off the debate, I adapted a question from an article by Will Knight in a recent issue of Technology Review.
If a child runs in front of a self-driving car, is it ethical for the car to injure or kill its own passengers in order to avoid the child?
The question split the class roughly in two. Some students argued that the car should avoid the child at all costs – even at the risk of serious injury or death to the car’s passengers. Others argued that the life of the person in the car was at least equal to that of the child. And if the car contains more than one passenger, wouldn’t multiple lives outweigh the value of one child’s life? Why should the child alone be protected?
The students also weighed the value of different lives. I asked them to assume that I was in the car. So the question became: Which is more valuable, the life of a child or the life of a mature adult? Some argued that the child was more valuable because she has many years of life yet to live. By comparison, I have lived many years and “used up” some of my value.
Others argued exactly the opposite. A mature adult is a storehouse of knowledge and wisdom. To lose that would be a blow not only to the individual but also to the community. The death of a child, though tragic, would eliminate only a small quantity of wisdom.
The question then evolves to: Could we have different ethical systems in cars that are used in different cultures? For instance, could cars that are used in cultures that value older people as fonts of wisdom, use an ethical system that protects adults over children? At the same time, could cars used in youth-oriented cultures, opt to protect children ahead of adults? What are the ethics here?
As you may have noticed, we were all making one key assumption: that self-driving cars will be delivered with an ethical system already installed. Let’s change that assumption. Let’s say the car arrives in your driveway (it delivers itself presumably) with no ethical rules programmed into it. The first thing we do is to program in the rules that we believe are the most ethical. The rules I program into my car may be different than the rules you put in your car.
This is, of course, exactly what we do today. When I drive my car, it’s controlled by my ethical system. Your ethical system controls your car. Our ethics may be different, so our cars “behave” differently. We’re quite used to that in everyday life, partially because the rules are not explicit. But as we explicitly program ethics into cars, is that really the way we want to do it?
Pushing on, we also addressed questions of self-driving cars with no passengers. We generally assume that self-driving cars will have passengers and at least one of those will be a responsible adult. But do they have to? Here are two variants:
- I want a pizza. Is it ethical for me to send my self-driving car to the local pizza place to pick it up for me? Conversely, could the pizza place simply deliver it to me in a self-driving car with no human in it?
- Is it ethical for a Dad to place his two kids in a self-driving car and instruct the car to deliver them to their primary school … without Dad going along? Could self-driving cars become child delivery systems?
I think we can find many more questions here. To wit: Can you own a self-driving car or is it a community resource to be shared? Does a self-driving car have to look like a regular old car? Why? (Here’s an example of one that doesn’t).
There’s a lot to think about here. Indeed, we may find that it will be more difficult to solve the ethical problems than technical problems. I’ll write more about these issues in the future. In the meantime: Safe driving!
Business School And The Swimmer’s Body Fallacy
He’s tall because he plays basketball.
Michael Phelps is a swimmer. He has a great body. Ian Thorpe is a swimmer. He has a great body. Missy Franklin is a swimmer. She has a great body.
If you look at enough swimmers, you might conclude that swimming produces great bodies. If you want to develop a great body, you might decide to take up swimming. After all, great swimmers develop great bodies.
Swimming might help you tone up and trim down. But you would also be committing a logical fallacy. Known as the swimmer’s body fallacy, it confuses selection criteria with results.
We may think that swimming produces great bodies. But, in fact, it’s more likely that great bodies produce top swimmers. People with great bodies for swimming – like Ian Thorpe’s size 17 feet – are selected for competitive swimming programs. Once again, we’re confusing cause and effect. (Click here for a good background article on swimmer’s body fallacy).
Here’s another way to look at it. We all know that basketball players are tall. But would you accept the proposition that playing basketball makes you tall? Probably not. Height is not malleable. People grow to a given height because of genetics and diet, not because of the sports they play.
When we discuss height and basketball, the relationship is obvious. Tallness is a selection criterion for entering basketball. It’s not the result of playing basketball. But in other areas, it’s more difficult to disentangle selection factors from results. Take business school, for instance.
In fact, let’s take Harvard Business School or HBS. We know that graduates of HBS are often highly successful in the worlds of business, commerce, and politics. Is that success due to selection criteria or to the added value of HBS’s educational program?
HBS is well known for pioneering the case study method of business education. Students look at successful (and unsuccessful) businesses and try to ferret out the causes. Yet we know that, in evidence-based medicine, case studies are considered to be very weak evidence.
According to medical researchers, a case study is Level 3 evidence on a scale of 1 to 4, where 4 is the weakest. Why is it so weak? Partially because it’s a sample of one.
It’s also because of the survivorship bias. Let’s say that Company A has implemented processes X, Y, and Z and been wildly successful. We might infer that practices X, Y, and Z caused the success. Yet there are probably dozens of other companies that also implemented processes X, Y, and Z and weren’t so successful. Those companies, however, didn’t “survive” the process of being selected for a B-school case study. We don’t account for them in our reasoning.
(The survivorship bias is sometimes known as the LeBron James fallacy. Just because you train like LeBron James doesn’t mean that you’ll play like him).
So we have some reasons to suspect the logical underpinnings of a case-base education method. So, let’s revisit the question: Is the success of HBS graduates due to selection criteria or to the results of the HBS educational program? HBS is filled with brilliant professors who conduct great research and write insightful papers and books. They should have some impact on students, even if they use weak evidence in their curriculum. Shouldn’t they? Being a teacher, I certainly hope so. If so, then the success of HBS graduates is at least partially a result of the educational program, not just the selection criteria.
But I wonder …
Seeing With Your Eyes
I’d be happy to check you in.
Some years ago, on a business trip, I checked into a hotel that had just implemented a new computer system. I asked the desk clerk how he liked it. He responded very positively: “It’s great. It’s so much better than the previous system.” He smiled broadly and spoke enthusiastically. I assumed that he was telling the truth.
I also noticed some telling details. He had to bend far forward to reach the keyboard. Then he had to tilt his head back to see the screen. It looked awkward to say the least. He couldn’t make eye contact with me and use the system at the same time.
More problematically, the system was rigid and field-oriented. The screen contained many fields, not all of which were necessary for each client. But you couldn’t skip a field. To get from Field A to Field Z, you had to navigate sequentially through Field B, then Field C, and so on. The poor guy must have hit the Return key a dozen times while checking me in. He couldn’t check me in and have a friendly conversation at the same time.
I noted two things about the situation. First, the man seemed genuinely pleased with the new system. He recommended it without reservation. (No pun intended). Second, the system really wasn’t very good. The man didn’t realize what he might have had.
I also thought about how I might act if I were an executive at the hotel company. If I listened to what the desk clerk said, I would congratulate the IT department, maybe give out a bonus or two, and move on to the next problem.
But if I looked instead of listening, I might have had a very different reaction. The system was awkward, physically uncomfortable, and not conducive to good customer communication. I might not have torn the system out, but I certainly would have requested an upgrade.
This is a pretty good illustration of the difference between seeing with your mind and seeing with your eyes. The desk clerk was seeing with his mind. He had a mental image of the old system (“clunky, user hostile”) and of the new system (“much improved”). He didn’t see what he was actually doing. He didn’t perceive any shortcomings because he was comparing it, not to an ideal system, but to an old system.
A good observer, on the other hand, would not compare the system to preconceived notions. A good observer would have no preconceived notions. She would merely observe and identify problems and opportunities.
My experience reminds me of the women who designed the Volvo concept car some years ago. If I were designing a car, I would assume that it “should” have a hood (bonnet) that opens. After all, all cars have hoods that open. There must be a reason. That’s a notion that I see in my mind’s eye, not in my physical eye.
The Volvo designers, on the other hand, simply observed how people used their cars. They noted that drivers rarely open the hoods. Indeed, they do so only to add windshield washer fluid. The designers asked a simple question: Why bother? They put a fluid filler opening on the outside of the car and simplified the entire front end of the car by eliminating the openable hood.
The designers created a car that is simpler, cleaner, lighter, and stronger. That’s good design. It comes from seeing the world as it is, not as it’s assumed to be.
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